


lost in the palms

by deniigiq



Series: Into the Multiverse [16]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Spider-Gwen (Comics)
Genre: (in reference to a child), (in the guise of training), Earth-65, Eating Disorders, Elektra is DD in this verse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Past Child Abuse, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21759472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Matt had scars across his ribs and back in patterns which looked like palm fronds laid over each other.(DA Nelson learns about Murderdock's transformation into a human weapon through the scars on his body.)
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Elektra Natchios, Matt Murdock & Samuel Chung, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Series: Into the Multiverse [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1348219
Comments: 13
Kudos: 437





	lost in the palms

**Author's Note:**

> This is fucking heavy, y'all. Much darker and much more flowery than I usually write. Wrote it a few months back, half falling asleep and apparently my brain was _in_ some places. 
> 
> There are references to torture in the guise of training, self-harm, abuse, eating disorders (linked to anxiety and trauma), child abuse, and young people committing murder below. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

Matt had scars across his ribs and back in patterns which looked like palm fronds laid over each other. These, Foggy was not allowed to touch.

He was allowed to snake his fingers up Matt’s hips. To skirt them across the mostly smooth skin that stretched from the peak of his hip to the bottom of his ribcage. He was allowed to sink his thumbs into that skin and to press and pull and knead.

But he was not allowed to nip or bite any of that expanse.

Teeth were allowed in the juncture of Matt’s thigh and pelvis. They were allowed to graze his collarbones and shoulders. They were most welcome up at the top of his throat, where they could elicit both soft sighs and harsh breathing.

But they and all fingers were to steer clear of the palm fronds.

Foggy asked once where the fronds came from and got nothing.

He asked where the lines across Matt’s belly came from and was given an image in the form of a knife. He asked about the gnarled knot just right of Matt’s navel and learned the caliber of the gun which had fired a bullet into that place. He asked about the row of lines that crawled up Matt’s knee and learned of a fight gone south and a man twice Matt’s size dropping his weight on that twisted kneecap.

He asked of some smaller fronds on Matt’s thighs and his face was brought up, up, up all the way for a kiss.

Matt didn’t say, but he kissed and told.

Those textured gills left a special ache in Foggy’s throat.

That the thigh fronds could be spoken of in kisses and closed eyes but the ribs not acknowledged was a mystery which Foggy wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to.

He had his suspicions.

He’d seen Elektra’s bare shoulder blades.

She had palm fronds, too, though not in the same patterns. Matt’s wrapped themselves around his sides like an embrace. Elektra’s blossomed out from the lower right hand side of her back like fans.

The scars spoke of not one, but many wounds inflicted in the same fashion, with a similar focal point in mind. The way that some were raised and others were delicate, barely-there shadows hinted at different pressures and instruments used to inflict them.

Matt’s hands, the fronts especially, spoke of similar treatment.

The pads of his fingers had escaped much troubling, but the creases between each of his knuckles and the flats of his palms were roped with the spirits of old wounds. Some were straight. They were lines which could be tracked from the edge of one palm to the next, sometimes from palm to palm, even.

Others were single, wrinkled dips or blotches like burn marks. Matt had, in the center of each hand and each foot, a raised bump. Like a stigmata, except the one on Matt’s right hand was small, half the size of a pea, while the one on his left formed a shallow divot nearly the size of a dime.

Matt told Foggy once that he’d hammered nails through men’s hands and they’d all cried for God, but none of them were ever taken up by Him in those moments.

Matt knew where to drive metal so that it missed veins and arteries.

He had intimate knowledge of both muscle and vein, or so his left and right palms said, anyways.

Foggy thought, stroking his own palms and thumbs across that skin which he was allowed, that Matt had never done anything to anyone which he hadn’t experienced himself.

In some ways, it was impressive. That Matt had picked himself up and learned from his screaming flesh where others would have been blinded by fire was no doubt astonishing.

But more than that, it was deeply,

deeply,

distressing.

Matt’s bones and the muscles stretched over them and the fronds and willow branches which wove baskets where the fronds couldn’t reach told stories of a burning that few bodies could take.

Matt’s scars spoke stories of years upon years of torture. Of years upon years of being viewed as a thing.

Not a person.

A tool.

A stone to be carved into. A basket to be woven.

A blade to be sharpened. Grated against stones of varying grit until it was so delicate and thin that you wouldn’t even feel it sliding through your skin until it was too late.

Matt was a blade in the grip of the Hand.

He slept as a blade. He vibrated, singing as a blade.

He slipped through shadows and men and plans and procedure and law and justice and right through cold air like he’d never known what it felt like to be anything but sharp, biting metal.

That wasn’t true, though.

The scars told that story.

The scars on his thighs spoke of someone trying to wrest control from those inflicting the fronds, besides the screech in his own head.

He’d kiss Foggy rather than talk about them.

Speaking of them meant that he had to remember the messiness of that struggle. The inelegance.

Matt loathed inelegance. Messiness. Complication.

And yet he, for so long, had been the blade used to inflict it.

Foggy didn’t know fully the story of Matt’s scars, but he thought, tracing them, that at some point, he would find out.

He didn’t doubt for a moment that he would be devastated.

But Matt slept through the pain, and so for now, Foggy would, too.

The answer to all the questions he had came in the form of Elektra.

She and Matt shared a soul, she told Foggy. She told him that once back when they were all stupid, stupid kids and she told him again now, with new meaning and purpose, that this soul had been forged into twin blades by the Hand.

She called it a trial by fire, but what she called it later, a few drinks in, was a slog through hell.

With the boy who she’d elected as her son in her arms, she told Foggy that she’d lifted him before the Hand could find him.

“Babes like Sammy are their favorite targets,” she explained. “He’s got no one and nothing, Foggy. Who would even notice if he was gone?”

It was a good question because Sammy was so small, even for a six-year-old. He appeared more as five and when he was sleeping, could be mistaken as four. He’d lived for two years as a thing, like Matt. Like Elektra.

Except unlike them, Sammy had been put on display. He was kept in the shadows only until his act came on. He had a natural grace, Sam did. He couldn’t remember not having it. He struggled to describe his birth mother and in English, he just shook his head and hid from the question.

Sammy had scars on his body which he didn’t like anyone to touch. Just like Elektra. Just like Matt. Foggy gave him a bath once to ward off the chill of the snow from outside, the same which had stained Sammy’s hands and cheeks bright red and made him puff softly, and had found them scattered there across his skin, just waiting.

Sam had scars on his hands and his knees. He had a river of pale raised skin on his side, which, when touched, made him whine and squirm and twist his arm in Foggy’s grip.

It was a lot for a child so young, already, but the worst of Sam’s scarring was internal, Elektra said.

He was very quiet. Very shy. Afraid of people—non-threatening people—who spoke to him. He would often become anxious, which children as small as him could express mostly in murmuring about a tummy ache.

Sam’s tummy aches led him not to eat. And not eating scared him.

He sometimes mumbled at uneaten food on his plate. Foggy hadn’t thought much of it until he’d fed the kid in Matt’s presence and Matt had frozen in the kitchen at Sam’s mumbling and had hurried over to start speaking to him in hushed Japanese.

Japanese was the language which Matt had gleaned in the space between his fronds and weaving. He spoke it fluently. He had dual citizenship. Foggy could see him sometimes listening for a familiar sound from that country when they walked past Chinatown or Buddhist temples.

Matt spoke Japanese, but he understood bits and pieces of Mandarin. Elektra had learned Mandarin when they were younger, and Matt had been one of the few objects she’d had to practice on.

Whatever Sammy mumbled, Matt could understand enough of it to become upset.

He would gather Sam up from his seat when he started mumbling and would sometimes rock the boy back and forth, back and forth, in his arms.

He told Foggy only after he asked that Sam constantly apologized for not finishing food.

He thought he’d be beaten. He tried to say that he’d finish it later if he was given the chance.

It made him more anxious, which made him sicker, which would make him vomit later and then he’d be convinced that he’d done something wrong and wouldn’t ask for food again.

It was then that Foggy saw Matt’s knuckles whiten with fury. He clenched the bones of his fingers around his stigmata scars and forced them to open, inch by inch.

“I would never claim to be a kind or fair man,” he told Foggy. “But even I draw the line at starving children. What purpose does it serve besides to keep them small and weak? I don’t understand. It serves no one and nothing but an overseer’s ego.”

Matt’s philosophies of strength were tied up with purpose.

Which, he told Foggy, was how he’d come by all his scars.

“They all served a purpose at one point or another,” he said.

“Even the ones on your back?” Foggy asked him.

Matt pressed his lips together. He closed his eyes.

And nodded.

The fronds had come when Matt and Elektra had entered the first circle of the Hand, right out of the fingers from their lost lives and teachers. Matt’s fronds came from the end of a staff.

“I was too slow and stupid to protect my ribs, so they broke them,” Matt said. “The choice was to wise up or eventually die of a puncture or pneumonia. So I wised up.”

Elektra’s came from a different staff.

“Hers used to bleed,” Matt said. “We shared a bed, and they’d bleed for hours and I’d wake up with sticky hands.”

“No one treated you guys?” Foggy asked.

“We had to earn treatment,” Matt said. “Nothing is given for free by the Hand.”

“How do you earn treatment?” Foggy said, trying to be nonjudgmental but failing because the idea was in itself preposterous.

“You don’t die,” Matt said. “You get up when they tell you to stay down. And then one day, you get up for what you’re convinced is the last time and you decide that if you’re going down and you’re staying there, then by God, it’s going to be swinging. And in that moment, you stop the heart of the hand that feeds you.”

“And then,” he said, “You’ve earned treatment.”

Matt and Elektra had shared a cell before they’d shared a room. They’d shared a cell until Elektra had taken a knee for the last time.

With her first kill under her belt, she’d earned treatment. She was removed from the cell.

Matt stayed there for another month by himself.

He described to Foggy the feeling he’d had at the moment he’d finally earned his treatment as ‘being drowned by the devil.’

“I didn’t breathe,” he told Foggy, pressing Foggy’s fingers into the gaps between his ribs with his own hands. “I didn’t think. It was like everything stopped and went quiet. Silent. I couldn’t hear or feel anything. It was like something had burned its way through me and left nothing behind but an empty shell. But it was over, and I stayed standing for long enough for them to take me seriously. And then that was it. Everything was gone again.”

Then Matt and Elektra shared a room. They’d had two twin beds in it.

For the first year, they slept together in one. For the first six months, Matt said that they’d sleep together, shaking.

“We must have been scared,” Matt said. “But I don’t remember being scared. I think I was too tired to be scared. They put us in school. We had to learn the language. We had to keep up and then we had to train. I don’t know when we slept, I just remember the shaking.”

“For how long?” Foggy asked him.

“Highschool until eighteen. They started sending us out our senior year. The routine had to change in college. They picked our courses. They screened everything I took. Everything. They didn’t trust me, but when they weren’t looking, Elektra signed up for a seminar instead of a lecture. She got to talk in class and she remembered what it felt like.”

Matt seldom finished the phrase ‘what it felt like.’ He didn’t seem to know how. At best he’d say, ‘before.’ ‘What it felt like before.’ But he struggled to remember and define specifically what he meant by that. Instead he’d settle his cheek against something and stop, hum, or think.

And then he’d pretend that the conversation had never happened.

Elektra said that she felt in her heart that Matt was cradling a grain of hope and facing away from the rest of them, just in case someone else noticed it.

Foggy decided that she was probably right. It was most striking in those moments when Matt’s subconscious leapt before it looked.

He’d unthinkingly swipe Sam right up off his feet and toss him over his shoulder to shrieking giggles. Similarly, if Sam made any sound of distress, Matt’s whole body twitched towards him before he caught himself and forced himself to evaluate the sound for an order of magnitude. 

He’d do the same type of thing for people in the street. He’d offhandedly pick up a dropped glove or scarf or he’d break down a box or move a glass out of harm’s way. People didn’t notice him doing those things because they were distracted by the cane, but Foggy saw the gestures more and more often now that he himself wasn’t looking at the cane.

He came home and found mugs he’d left on the table set onto napkins or paper. He found that Matt tended to prefer to give before receiving when they were having sex. He found that Matt always seemed to be listening and alert to people screaming in the neighborhood. He’d sit up in bed out of a dead sleep sometimes and leave Foggy to go have a listen out on the balcony.

He came back eventually, but sometimes, just sometimes, Foggy couldn’t help but wonder why he was taking so long.

What questions was he running through in that head of his?

What decision was he making that took so much waffling?

When he came back to Foggy, he often did not go back to sleep. His head would keep tilting. He was still listening. Keep tabs on something happening far away. Listening to how it played out.

Matt once decked a man in the middle of the street for no goddamn reason while his hand was tucked up against Foggy’s elbow on a walk.

The guy grabbed at his face and swore and swore and swore, and Matt apologized and apologized and apologized, enough that no police were called and people were generally put off the scent. But Foggy had seen what had happened and Matt had been waiting for that mark like a shark.

Matt didn’t say anything about it and Foggy didn’t ask any questions.

But that grain of hope. That glowing spark.

Foggy was sure that it was there.

He was surprised to find that it didn’t make him feel any more or less strongly towards Matt. He’d have thought that knowing that Matt was, at heart, good or evil would have moved a needle some direction for him, but it didn’t seem to be working that way.

Instead, he found himself charmed by Matt’s many gestures and behaviors. The things that he did which might be considered ‘good’ seemed to be outweighed by the routine of his typical nights. He didn’t show any real interest in doing them, if anything they seemed more like flickers of impulse.

Foggy found them cute.

He realized that that was probably strange, given that Matt lived in and out of bloodbath and torture. But he still found the impulses cute. And he still found those moments when Matt leaned into his charm and false kindness to be as uncomfortable as those moments when Matt wanted to submit to him during sex.

It was a strange balance there.

But Foggy was secretly glad that he didn’t like Matt more when he was being kind.

Because Matt wasn’t kind. And Foggy wasn’t there to fix him. He didn’t want to fix Matt. He found that he just wanted to hold him.

He liked the feeling that Matt brought him when he allowed the closeness. He liked the feeling that he’d made it with someone as handsome and intelligent as Matt.

He liked being able to fuck with Matt’s head and his body without fatal consequences, and he loved it when Matt pressed into him and let him look into his empty eyes without sunglasses. He loved Matt pressing each of Foggy’s fingers into the dips between his ribs while telling Foggy a story of how he’d been beaten to the point that he’d killed a man.

Was it exciting?

In a way.

But more importantly, it was complicated. And honest.

Matt didn’t make excuses for himself. He wasn’t ashamed or sorry that he’d killed this man who’d hurt him. He was sorry that he’d been scared. He was sorry that he and Elektra had been scared. But more than that, he was angry that this man had gotten the better of him in this moment of desperation.

Matt was furious that he’d been forced to relinquish himself to the devil.

He boiled at the devil taking his awareness from him.

He wanted to feel it all. He wanted every motion to be intentional. He wanted to lead an intentional, purposeful life. And he would have no one and nothing stand in his way.

And that was beyond arousing to Foggy. It hit something deeper than arousal that surged into an undeniable urge to give Matt whatever he wanted.

He wanted to watch Matt live intentionally. He wanted to be a part of Matt’s intentionality. It was almost like Matt’s determination that Foggy served a purpose validated Foggy's own fears that he was helpless in the city’s tide.

“Hey,” he said, reaching over and placing a palm across the small of Matt’s back as he pulled his shirt over his head.

“Hm?”

“C’mere.”

Matt purred and leaned down onto his chest.

“You’re amazing, did you know that?” Foggy goaded, wrapping one of his hands around the back of Matt’s thigh to encourage him to come up further onto the bed.

“Amazing?” Matt hummed. “No, I don’t like it. Give me another.”

“Gorgeous,” Foggy told him.

“Closer but keep going.”

“Astonishing. Devastating. Astronomical.”

Matt laughed at him.

“Astronomical?” he repeated.

“You got mass, hon,” Foggy said, pressing his lips into Matt’s neck. “You draw people in like you’ve got your own field of gravity.”

He could listen to Matt’s laugh all day long.

“I tell you a man’s beaten me senseless and I killed him and it turns you on?” Matt purred. “Dark, Nelson. Shame on you. I like it. Fuck me.”

And who was Foggy to resist the fronds?


End file.
